Recent years have seen the explosive growth of the Internet as not only a communication system of global scope, but also a global digital library. Indeed, the Internet has become a key source of news and information on a full spectrum of topics for users the world over.
Fueling this growth, millions of users have submitted, or posted, information to services, such as public newsgroups, message boards, and subscription mailing lists, that provide a relatively simple and inexpensive mechanism for users to share information electronically with many people. However, despite success in rapidly increasing the quantity of information on the Internet, the present inventors have recognized that these services suffer from at least two problems that ultimately limit the utility and value of their vast stores of user-generated information.
The first problem concerns the accessibility of the information stored by these services. Specifically, many services use their own unique form of user interface for posting and finding relevant information. This diversity, or lack of standardization, requires users of multiple services not only to learn different interfaces, but also to post and search messages on each service separately, even when the services focus on related topics. Although some interfaces allow the searching of several newsgroups for current and past articles, most, if not all, of them require users to repeatedly define and initiate searches to check for new relevant postings. Moreover, some services delete the oldest submissions or content on a weekly basis, reducing chances of users finding the content most relevant to their needs.
The second problem is the lack of an effective mechanism for collecting related information in a central database. In particular, many newsgroups and message boards focus on similar, highly related topics; yet they are not otherwise integrated or associated with each other or to other online sources of similar information, such as theme-oriented websites. For example, there are numerous independent health-oriented newsgroups, forums, message boards, and health-oriented websites in direct competition. This disunity forces users seeking the best user-generated information and potentially more authoritative, professionally authored information on a given topic to search multiple services and websites. Additionally, because many participants behave as spectators and do not actively contribute information, the direct competition not only leads to fragmented collections of information, but also divides the communities of active users across multiple services, frustrating the development of larger user communities.
Accordingly, there is a need not only to improve the value and utility of the vast stores of information on the Internet through new modes of access and collection, but also to encourage the growth of on-line communities.